


even in another time

by sunshine_states



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Metafiction, Show Critical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:00:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26681044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshine_states/pseuds/sunshine_states
Summary: Legends are public domain, even when those legends are rooted in historical fact.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters, Jon Snow/Daenerys Targaryen
Comments: 12
Kudos: 38





	even in another time

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a result of being in academia for too long. Title comes from Sappho's "“someone will remember us/I say/even in another time” poem fragment.

**From** **_An Account of the Great War,_ ** **by Gendry Waters. 4th century AC.**

“Lady Sansa had flame-red hair and a serious face. Everyone said she looked very like her mother, Lady Catelyn Stark, but I have heard that Lady Catelyn smiled a great deal, and Lady Sansa almost never did. She was kind, though, and gave me a good room to sleep in. But in one way her generosity was wasted, because I couldn’t sleep a wink. Arya was all I could see when I closed my eyes, and her face kept me awake. Somehow it seemed she was different than she had been the last time I saw her. I stayed up all night trying to figure it out.

“But back to Lady Sansa. Twelve years I have known her, and never once has she displayed a crumb of pettiness or cruelty. I say this because certain self-interested parties in the Crownlands have said otherwise. Don’t believe their slander; there is no better queen or sister in all the land.”

**From** **_The Lai of Jonquil,_ ** **Jenny Karstark, 4th century AC.**

“Sansa Queen in the North commissioned this poem. May she who holds Winterfell look favorably upon my humble efforts.”

**From the** **_Daenerotembyr,_ ** **Vhaehra Aggaeron, Lys, c. 4th century AC. Translated from Low Valyrian by Janni daughter of Kawi, Vaes Dothrak University Press, 1345.**

“I sing of ice and the cleansing fire,

How Daenerys Stormborn crossed the Great Grass Sea,

Laid waste to cities, burned khals,

And broke the chain of the slaver…”

**From** **_The Death of King Jon,_ ** **Mya Malory. 952 AC.**

“First, How Rhaegar Targaryen stole away with the Lady Lyanna, and of the tragic consequences thereof.

“It befell in the days of Aerys Targaryen, when he was king of all Westeros, and reigned with fire and with blood, there was a grim and noble lord in the Northlands named Rickard Stark. And the lord had a daughter, Lyanna by name, who went with him to a tourney at Harrenhal. And it is said that Rhaegar Targaryen was there also, and with him Princess Elia, and that he played a tune so passing sweet that it made Lady Lyanna weep…”

  
  


**From** **_Sign and Herald of the New Age: A New Look at Ruban Oatwright’s_ ** **The War for the Dawn. Jeyne Pyke, King’s Landing University, 1359 AC.**

_‘...Daenerys, queen and conqueror, she who outshone the moon in her beauty, whose dainty feet had carried her across the Red Waste and crushed the slaver’s yoke, rose from her seat of stone to address the Northern king._

_“Who are you,” said she, “that you would seek my service? I am Daenerys Stormborn, and I do not follow the commands of a ragged northern pretender.”_

_And King Jon was silent, for the radiance of her beauty had stolen his speech. She glowed like a sword of Valyrian steel in that deep and dark-stoned room, upright and righteous, and though he had seen many wonderful things in his adventures, Daenerys Stormborn was the most wonderful of them all._

_“Lady,” said he at last, “I would not do so for a lesser need. For the dead are coming, and they care not who sits upon the Iron Throne. If we cannot come together in defense of these green lands, they will be naught but snow and corpses ere long - yea, and your gorgeous beasts also.”’_

“A highly emotive and romanticized treatment of the tragic couple, typical of popular literature at the time, _The War for the Dawn_ ignited a craze for such stories among the general populace. Within six months it had spawned ten more stories of a similar nature. Like _War_ , these were serialized in _the King’s Gazette_ , and, although they enjoyed varying levels of popularity at the time, their depiction of Daenerys and her contemporaries has left an indelible mark on the collective consciousness. Few laypersons today are aware that the real Brienne of Tarth was not, as Minella Pyne’s 650-page epic _Oathkeeper_ implied, a noble stoic who melted only beneath her lover’s caresses. Indeed, primary sources suggest a passionate and warm-hearted warrior with a deep attachment not only to Jaime Lannister but also to Queen Sansa, Lady Arya Stark, and her squire Podrick Payne, who features in the somewhat more comic _Adventures of Pod_.*

“Likewise, Daenerys was emphatically not the virtuous priestess-figure of Oatwright’s patriarchal imaginings, but rather a ruthless and determined young warlord with a unique genius for violent political theater. Jon Snow, far from the cloddish, relentlessly noble swain depicted here, once executed a 12-year would-be assassin and was renowned for his almost inhuman ferocity in battle. 

“But these were not the stories that Oatwright’s readership wanted to hear. At the time of publication, Westeros was enjoying an extended period of remarkable prosperity; the rapidly-forming middle class in the kingdom were hungry for tales of right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice. Stories about ‘the human heart in conflict with itself,’ as Samwell Tarly once put it, had fallen out of fashion.”

* This delightful satire of courtly ideals deserves a mention here, as does its author, the inimitable Alise Hill, whose wry treatment of the War of the Five Kings and the subsequent War for the Dawn serves as a refreshing digestif for both the sentimental paeans of her contemporaries and the exaggeratedly grim adaptations of the past ten years. 

  
  


**Pin. Enamel and metal. 1264. Donation from the Hill Family.**

An enamel pin depicting Sansa Stark. Manufactured and sold in Winterfell. Sansa is depicted as a young queen in furs standing triumphant under the words “THE NORTH REMEMBERS” in Old Westerosi. The bird crushed under her heel most likely symbolizes her guardian, political mentor, and eventual nemesis Petyr Baelish.

**From “** **_A Girl Knows: The World of Arya Stark.”_ ** **Exhibit hosted at the Royal Museum of Winterfell, 1359 AC.**

“When Arya Stark sailed for Essos in the aftermath of the War for the Dawn, the chronicler Samwell Tarly wrote, “Had anyone glimpsed her straight figure from a distance, they would never have known that she was weeping.” For all the fame - and notoriety - that she would gain in the years to come, it bears remembering that at this point Arya Stark was merely a teenage girl who had lost most of her family in the span of a few short years. By all accounts, she had been on that battlefield when Jon and Daenerys sacrificed themselves to stop the Others, and it was she who, in the aftermath, wrapped her brother’s lifeless form in the tattered remains of her cloak. And so it is perhaps no surprise that her subsequent writings are tinged with a poignant, indefinable sense of grief. The artifacts displayed here...”

**Sword. Steel. 4th century AC. From the collections of Queen Catelyn Stark.**

Lady Arya Stark’s favored blade Needle. Donated to the royal collections by Nymeria Waters after her mother’s death in 371 AC.

**_“‘In the ‘Game of Thrones’ finale, the night is dark and full of disappointment.”_ ** **Martyn Dunwood,** **_The Dornish Eye_ ** **, 1360 AC.**

“...and what of Queen Sansa (Yselda Hill), whose thin-lipped expression suggests that she has recently tasted something sour? Hill is a warm, emotive actress, and when you consider that Sansa Stark was famed among her contemporaries for her generous patronage of all forms of art, music, and literature, the depiction of her court as dour and sunless verges on insulting. Her sister Arya (Jhaera Stone), rather than embarking on a career as a wanderer and proto-sociologist as her historical counterpart did, simply gets in a boat and sails...somewhere. And poor Daenerys (Rhaena Vaeron) has to lose her mind before she sacrifices herself to save the world - because Seven forbid we miss a single square on our game of Misogyny Bingo.

“Basically, you’re better off reading _The War for the Dawn._ ”


End file.
